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Kaz Grala won last year's NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Daytona International Speedway at the age of 18.

Youngest winner Kaz Grala is no ordinary NASCAR Xfinity Series rookie at Daytona

19-year-old driver won in Truck Series race at Daytona Beach a year ago

February 14, 2018

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Normally, a teenager would approach his Xfinity Series debut at Daytona International Speedway with a high degree of trepidation. Angst, even. Monster-size butterflies, to be sure. So it is with Kaz Grala, who’ll make his inaugural Xfinity start Saturday afternoon on NASCAR’s biggest stage.

But there’s this caveat: the 19-year-old Bostonian is 1-for-1 in major NASCAR races at the self-proclaimed World Center of Racing. He qualified P-1, led 17 laps and won last year’s Camping World Truck Series opener, becoming the youngest winner (18 years, 1 month, 26 days) in the speedway’s 60-year history. “No matter how I do here from now on,” he said early this week, “that will probably be my most special day. The first one of anything is always like that.”

Grala recently sat in an Xfinity car for the seat and steering-wheel fitting, but he has never made a lap. That comes Friday, when teams practice for a couple of hours before qualifying Saturday morning and running 300 miles in the afternoon. It’ll be his first effort in a season-long campaign with JGL Racing, which has a new Ford-based technical alliance with Roush Fenway Racing. He has only a vague idea of what to expect in the 120-lap race.

“I’m sure the car will be a lot different from the truck that I won in last year,” he said. “These Xfinity cars have much less downforce and much less grip. It’s all in the design of the bodies. People tell me you’re all elbows (steering quickly and aggressively) in these cars versus being fairly smooth in the trucks. The trucks are very, very stable; it’s a very different style of racing.”

As for Friday’s two-hour practice: “If you make single-car runs, you’re not learning anything about pack racing,” Grala said. “And if you practice in a pack, you’re still not learning anything about pack racing. Sure, you feel the air and the draft, but it’s different in practice because guys are just trying to feel out their cars. Nobody cares about going to the front. In fact, you learn less leading the pack than at the back or in the middle. We could have 10 hours of practice and it still wouldn’t fully prepare you for the race, when guys are trying to get to the front. You just have to jump right in there and go for it.”

Perhaps more than outsiders realize, raw talent alone no longer paves the pathway from JGL to, for example, JGR or RCR. (Dale Earnhardt and Bill Elliott probably were too rough around the edges to get good rides today). Increasingly, younger drivers are learning to connect seamlessly with coat-and-tie executives and their sponsor reps. They’re honing their social skills, aiming to present themselves as extensions of a sponsor’s marketing department. Public relations and media training and language arts have become as de rigueur as working on simulators and testing. It’s all part of NASCAR’s new 2.0 image.

“There’s definitely a youth movement,” he said. “Over the past five or 10 years, a lot of drivers have been close in age. It only makes sense that as they’re getting older and retiring together, they’re making spots available for younger guys. (Witness: Alex Bowman, William Byron and Bubba Wallace). That’s just the natural dynamic of the sport at this time.

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“It’s a given that just like in any sport, I have to perform to move up with the other younger drivers. But that depends a lot on the team I have behind me: the ownership, the manufacturer, the crew chief and his shop and road people. It depends on the rules package. There are so many variables that affect performance within an organization. As a driver, you have to take control of the variables you have in your hands. That’s where performance comes in.”

The other variables are off-track. How do you interact with the media, especially when things go sideways? Will you willingly get up after a tough night race for an early-morning television interview? Are you a passably decent public speaker? Is signing autographs an honor or a chore? Can you stay cool when a fan screams obscenities as you head toward your hauler after a bad day?

“In this day and age, with so many young and talented drivers coming up, if you’re going to be successful, you need to stand out from the rest of them off the track,” Grala said. “You need to be able to speak well and show your emotions in the right way. You have to learn to walk a fine line between knowing what you can and cannot do. More than ever, your off-track image is almost as important as your on-track performance. That’s something I’ve known about for most of my life.

“The important thing is that your interaction with fans has got to be natural. It has to be authentic, so you can’t fake it. You can’t try to be a driver and you can’t try to be a public figure… you just need to be you. You have to be a regular person, just like you really are. And that’s very important.”

Of course, so is winning at Daytona Beach -- a box that Grala checked last year.